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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27904516">Hot Chocolate</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/PostcardsfromTheoryland/pseuds/PostcardsfromTheoryland'>PostcardsfromTheoryland</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>December Fic Prompts [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Voltron: Legendary Defender</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, I swear that tag will make sense, Keith is a rubber duck, Stress Baking</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:08:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,306</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27904516</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/PostcardsfromTheoryland/pseuds/PostcardsfromTheoryland</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A little fic about late night stress-baking shenanigans.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hunk &amp; Keith (Voltron)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>December Fic Prompts [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2037385</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>49</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Hot Chocolate</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This was supposed to be yesterday's prompt, which I failed in completing since I basically passed out on the couch after getting home from work. We'll see if I can get the other prompt done today as well.....</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Keith was feeling pretty pleased with himself. It was late, late enough for the rest of the castle, even Pidge, to be asleep at this point, but he'd managed to defeat the Gladiator on level 14. He was originally planning to go to bed after he hit the showers, but he was still kind of worked up, so he took a detour into the kitchens. Lance and Shiro had found a tea that was sort of like chamomile on their last shopping trip, so Keith figured he could grab a mug of that, do a little light reading while the castle was quiet and still, and then maybe feel tired enough to go to bed.</p>
<p>That plan went out the window when he made it into the kitchen just in time to hear Hunk give an angry shout, accompanied by a large metal crash.</p>
<p>"Uhh...I'll come back later," Keith tried, but before he could get another step Hunk had grabbed his wrist and dragged him into the kitchen.</p>
<p>"Nope," Hunk said, bodily picking Keith up and setting him on the counter, which was odd, because Hunk had definitely yelled at Pidge just earlier today for sitting on the counter, but Hunk seemed kind of stressed out, so Keith figured it would be better not to point that out.</p>
<p>"Everything ok?"</p>
<p>"No, everything is <em>not okay</em>," Hunk said, and Keith got the feeling that if he wasn't wearing oven mitts he'd be tearing his hair out. "I picked up that blue powdery stuff from Efzan, right? It tasted almost exactly like chocolate and I thought it would function like cocoa powder and I know we're all homesick and craving Earth food. And I couldn't sleep so I figured I might as well start now, and then when everyone woke up there would be chocolate muffins or whatever for breakfast. But this is, ugh." He flopped forward enough to bang his head against the cabinets with a dull thud that probably hurt. "No matter what I do to it, I can't get it to set properly." Hunk gestured at the baking sheet that might have once held cookies, but now had a sort of burnt turquoise-ish sludge on it. "Every time I apply enough heat to get the things to cook, something weird happens to the not-cocoa-powder and it just like, <em>oozes</em>." And yeah, that definitely did look like ooze.</p>
<p>Keith could sympathize, he really could, but... "So why am I here?"</p>
<p>"You," Hunk said, looking him straight in the eye, "are going to be my duck."</p>
<p>"I'm...your duck," Keith repeated, mostly out of confusion. Had Hunk slept recently?</p>
<p>"Do you know that most programmers have a little rubber duck that they talk their coding problems out to?" Keith shook his head, still a little concerned. "Well, they do, and a lot of times when I tried a new recipe on Earth I'd bring the duck with me to figure things out. But do you know how many rubber ducks there are in space? None," Hunk answered before Keith could come up with a response. "You happened to still be awake, so now you're the duck."</p>
<p>"You know I don't actually know anything about baking, right?"</p>
<p>"Do you think rubber ducks know anything about coding? You just need to sit there and listen to me talk to myself."</p>
<p>Oh, that was a relief. Keith could do that. "So..." Keith gestured at the mess on the stove, and Hunk took that as permission to jump into a rant about the problems he'd encountered so far. Something about density and temperature to time ratio and the amount of whisking required. Keith honestly did try to follow it, but it just served as a reminder that Keith probably shouldn't try to bake anything more difficult than a boxed cake mix. The timer dinged, interrupting some kind of explanation of the space equivalent of chicken eggs, but Hunk just growled in frustration again as he took out another tray from the other oven.</p>
<p>"I thought if I tried to make macarons with it, if I tried a low heat for a longer time, that might work, but it's useless," he said, tossing the latest ruined batch onto the stove. This one had more liquified than anything else, and it was incredibly unappetizing, basically what Keith sort of imagined congealed smurf blood would look like. But it did smell a bit like chocolate, and Hunk had said it wasn't super hot, and no one had ever accused Keith of having any kind of self-preservation or impulse control.</p>
<p>So he swiped a finger through the blue mess and popped it into his mouth. And had a near out-of-body experience at the taste.</p>
<p>"It's useless, it's worthless, it's frustrating, it's infuriating, it's..."</p>
<p>"It's hot chocolate," Keith interrupted in a daze.</p>
<p>Hunk snapped out of his tirade to whip his head toward Keith. "What?"</p>
<p>"It's hot chocolate," he said again, grabbing a couple of spoons out of the drawer underneath him and handing one to Hunk. "Try it, you literally made hot chocolate. Like, exactly like hot chocolate."</p>
<p>Hunk seemed skeptical, but he did at least try a tiny spoonful. His eyes widened at the taste and he'd barely swallowed it before he was grabbing a pan to put on the stove and dumping in a bunch of ingredients, including the apparently blue hot chocolate powder.</p>
<p>"You've been promoted from Rubber Duck to Sous Chef," Hunk informed him.</p>
<p>"Uh..."</p>
<p>"Don't worry," he said, pulling him off the counter and toward the stove, "your job is just to stand here and whisk this pot until I tell you stop."</p>
<p>"Got it."</p>
<p>"Now, we have a lot of other ingredients, too, so why stop at just regular hot chocolate? Pidge obviously is getting peanut butter, and Lance is a coconut guy, and caramel is my go-to. Do you have any idea what hot chocolate flavors Shiro likes?"</p>
<p>"Can you do berry-ish? Like strawberry or cherry or something? Shiro always hoarded those chocolate-covered strawberries from the Garrison Officer parties."</p>
<p>"We don't have strawberries but we do have those little alma fruits that I made into jam a couple weeks ago and they're almost like strawberries. How about you?" Hunk asked.</p>
<p>"Oh, uh, just normal is fine for me," Keith stammered.</p>
<p>"Nope, not for the Sous Chef. Give me something to work with here, Keith."</p>
<p>Hot chocolate in general hadn't been something Keith got a lot during his childhood, much less <em>flavored</em> hot chocolate, but there had been that one time Shiro had taken him to the winter market in Platte City. It had been crowded and noisy, but one of the stands further off to the side did a bunch of hot chocolates, and when Shiro offered to buy him one and Keith had said anything was fine, he'd been presented with a cup of peppermint hot chocolate that tasted like absolute heaven.</p>
<p>"Do we have anything like mint?"</p>
<p>"Oooh," Hunk said, "there's an herb I picked up from Puig that's almost peppermint." While Keith continued to whisk as directed, Hunk had assembled a bunch of other ingredients that were apparently going to go into everyone's specially-flavored hot chocolates. "Now then," he said, "about a phoeb ago I came up with a recipe for marshmallows and never figured out a purpose for it. Serendipity, man. Now keep whisking."</p>
<p>By the time the other paladins shuffled into the kitchen for breakfast, both Keith and Hunk were completely exhausted; Keith's arms were sore from two hours worth of whisking to get the chocolate to the right temperature and consistency and Hunk was sporting a burn on one arm from a hot marshmallow mishap. But it was all worth it to see the looks on the others' faces when they found five mugs of specialty hot chocolate waiting for them.</p>
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